


The Doomed

by Nevospitanniy



Category: Dishonored (Video Games), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Corvosider - Freeform, Dishonored AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-19 01:28:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12400269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevospitanniy/pseuds/Nevospitanniy
Summary: Graves comes back after Grindelwald and Seraphina hires him as her personal Security consultant. She gets killed under mysterious circumstances and MACUSA blames Graves who has to go on the run.An abused orphan is sacrificed somewhere to a cult, becoming one with the Void.





	The Doomed

**Author's Note:**

> I refuse to take responsibility for my actions. Even where AUs are concerned, I’m playing hard and fast with the rules. Let’s just say, in neither of these universes it’s lore-compliant. 
> 
> Thanks to APC for the title.

“What was your name?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It does to me.”

He hesitates, twisting a ring on His finger.

“I can’t remember.”

/

The Void is impossible to describe, incomprehensible in its vastness, and oddly, artificially soundless. Still, yet always moving.

It’s His domain.

Graves puts a hand on a stone to his left - it feels unreal, it feels wrong, like whoever made it lost the true memory of touch. The brand a tattoo on his skin, His Mark, it seems to glisten in a dull light Graves doesn’t see a source of and he truly doesn’t want to know where it’s coming from, to _try_ to know. He may have some tricks up his sleeve, but understanding the Void is something no one can do. Even He can’t do it.

The Void defies explanation, gleeful in its rejection of a human mind. The Void is the beginning and an end, the Void will be there when you’re gone and when He’s gone.

He jokes, _jokes_ about it. Graves doesn’t know if He remembers what humor is or if it’s a habit to make Himself less alien and strange, but it’s doesn’t work. He has seen his own end, for the ever-generous Void gives Him offerings He doesn’t want but can’t refuse.

Unwarranted gifts are a tradition in these parts.

“You seem preoccupied today.”

He appears silently at his side, perching precariously at the very edge of the island, black eyes blinking at him curiously. Sitting down at the same stone he was thinking about earlier, Graves sighs.

“I don’t want to be rude.”

Shrugging coquettishly, He closes His legs. A pebble falls into endless depths of the Void from under His feet.

“You may be many things, Percival, but rude is not one of them.”

“Earlier, you called me a friend.”

Graves tries, fruitlessly, to decipher something, anything, behind the pitch black of His eyes. It’s a useless task, but he diligently tries every time He snaps reality in half like an old rubber band and brings Graves here, to a place that’s not a place.

An inelegant invitation, maybe, but an insistent one.

“Do you reject my friendship?”

His angular face doesn’t change and yet Graves feels like he’s a gossamer thread away from a fate worse than death.

“I’m just wondering if you remember what friends are. What being human feels like.”

He stops twirling a ring on His finger and raises one brow.

“I am as corporeal as I choose to be, with all the advantages and drawbacks of that form. And I haven’t been dead for that long.”

Graves winces. He has no need for food or water in the Void, but the need to ask ridiculous questions he already knows the answer to seems to be one He can’t fulfill.

“I never know where the boundaries with you are.”

With a scoff, He flickers out of existence just to reappear in front of Graves, looking down at him with a barely there amused expression.

“I _am_ the Void, Percival. There are no boundaries.”

/

The only thing that feels real is this non-world of a world is His touch. It’s warm and solid and it makes the Mark itch like a healing scab, begging to be ripped into.

/

“I was fifteen. When They killed me, you know.”

Nonchalant as per usual, face blank, eyes black. If He feels something, He’s not showing.

“Said I looked like their prophecy, said they’d do right by me. Ma cried I was finally good for something once in my entire life. I don’t think she liked the outcome much when Modesty gutted her and Chastity like a fish.”

“You look older than fifteen,” it’s probably not the thing Graves should’ve blurted out, it is decisively one of the last things in the list of appropriate responses.

He folds Him arms on His chest.

“If it’s any consolation, your eyesight is good.”

Graves refuses to feel embarassed again, so soon after the last time, too, yet feels his cheeks grow hot. But then again, Ilvermorny never gave any classes on god-like entities of untold power that lurk in the Great Nothing, bestowing inexplicable abilities on strangers, so he is at a definite disadvantage.

“Ma?” he asks instead, the word creeping up on him like a flood, licking his ankles with blistering cold.

“She adopted me. My birth mother is- lost.”

Something closely resembling shame hides in an unhappy corner of His mouth. Graves can’t keep his own shut.

“How can you not know?”

“Contrary to popular belief, Percival, I am neither omniscient, nor omnipotent. I am reasonably sure I came out of a woman’s womb, but I can’t see her face or hear her voice. Maybe my grief was too strong. Maybe I just forgot.”

He looks up into the non-existent sky, a swirl of colors humans have no names for, His lips softly parted.

“She would’ve been the one to get the Mark otherwise. Instead,” he puts his gaze onto Graves again, “my sister was the first. I don’t know if she understood any of it, but she took life with an ease beyond her years.”

He blinks into thin air several feet ahead of Graves onto a slab of stone suspended in time, gently dragging His finger over a gray granite of ceremonial altar along His hip.

“Gone too soon. She thanked me as she laid there dying, for giving her, powerless, a power. Her rage was pure as a heart of a star and burned just as bright. Think I felt its heat when she spilled blood. I loved it.”

“How many are there, the ones like me?”

He sits up on the altar, His legs dangling childishly from it. Graves feels like he’s missing something.

“Would you hate me if I don’t answer?”

The Void smiles down upon them with a razor-sharp grin made of phantom stars.

/

“Would you want to be human again?”

Eyelashes fluttering, He looks at His palm, studying the skin of it like for the first time.

“Would you?”

/

“Seraphina didn’t deserve what happened. I should’ve been there for her.”

Graves calls these impromptu Void visits ‘chats’, but they are essentially closer to group soul-searching, if He _had_ a soul to search, of course.

“Lots of people don’t deserve what happens to them,” He answers, bitterness making His edges blur for a second. “But it made me notice you. I hoped you would give me a show and, my, what a sight has it been so far. You cherish my gifts, Percival, you really do.”

“Everyone I ever knew accusing me of murdering Madam President, one of my closest friends, a woman I’ve known for years and swore to protect, making me run, making me _do_ things. That hurt. It still does.”

“Was it worth it?” He asks, eyes black starless nights. Graves wants to be infuriated, offended, maddened by this question, its insensitivity and bluntness cutting him without a knife. He feels the need to be burning with righteous fury, but he doesn’t.

The answer should have been an immediate ‘no’.

It’s not and the smug bastard knows it.

Graves averts his eyes to a tuft of gray lifeless grass under his feet. Rustling like paper, He appears next to him.

“There is no right answer, Percival. I can see into the hearts of men and you have lost so much so fast. It brings me no joy but I can not say I regret my choice.”

If He was human Graves could’ve sworn he heard guilt in His voice, ringing and multifaceted like it’s trapped inside a diamond, like it’s trapped inside your skull, echoing in the prison of bone. Graves knows a lot about prisons.

“I just wish she didn’t have to die,” he says and it’s true. ‘I wish we still met’ goes unsaid, but not unheard.

People call Him ‘the Outsider’, they are wrong. He gets under your skin in the nastiest of ways, His black smoke weaving its tendrils into your veins, every breath in your lungs carrying His lingering taste. He is Inside.

“I wish so too,” He lies and Graves wants to gouge out his bottomless eyes.

/

“How many people have you driven insane?” Graves frowns. They are sitting in a field of black flowers, moist soil slowly crumbling off of the island’s edge. In the suffocating dim of their neverwhen, His back is a tightrope between two mountains.

“Do you count?”

/

Graves wonders what knowing the future is like sometimes, cold stone of the altar against his side, while He stares into the sky, not even an inch away. He wonders if right now at this very moment He looks into the Void and the Void obeys, opens its gaping maw, shows Him how Graves dies. Graves wonders if He even cares.

He wants to ask so badly, but he wants to stop wanting even more.

Questions buzz in his head like a swarm of angry bloodflies, a dangerous cavalcade of possibilities pulsing with an ugly cruel tempo.

A warm hand touches his neck and the noise stops as if having never existed. Graves looks and sees nothing but a sea of black, barely contained within the shape of human eyes, brimming with something forgotten and cursed.

He can’t wait to drown in its liquid darkness and it hugs him like an old friend.


End file.
